PH Heroes: Jaguar XJR-S - Pistonheads.com
A Jaguar E-type 3. 8-litre coupe purred through my little town the other day. if I owned an E-type, I'd have 'smug' tattooed on a visually obvious body part. So imagine the sense of dread disbelief when in 1975 Jaguar released the E-type's successor, the XJ-S. People must have thought that Jaguar had left the disguise panels on when they painted the prototype. The automotive equivalent of a mash-up, a pack of disparate styling elements were splattered onto a shortened XJ saloon floorpan to form Frankenstein's coupe. And yet somehow the XJ-S managed to wheedle its way under our collective skin. Creaked at its (sometimes badly built) seams with the type of gentleman's club ambience only the British motor industry could genuinely create. No, you certainly can't judge a car by its appearance on the haunted fish tank, but the XJ-S had associations with some of the era's more suave characters, or so we thought at the time. Jaguar had turned down the opportunity to supply an E-type for the original of The Saint , condemning Roger Moore to drive around in a Volvo P1800 coupe (nice car, but not very aristocratic). But, realising the error of its ways, fixed it for Simon Templar (as played by Ian Ogilvy) to drive a white XJ-S in The Return of the Saint. And when Mike Gambit (Gareth Hunt) needed wheels to impress young bob-haired Purdey (Joanna Luvverly), he also rocked up in an XJ-S. Source: www.pistonheads.com
